The Group: Morningstar’s Research group provides independent analysis on individual securities, funds, markets, and portfolios. The Research group also provides data on hundreds of thousands of investment offerings, including stocks, mutual funds, and similar vehicles, along with real-time global market data on millions of equities, indexes, futures, options, commodities, and precious metals, in addition to foreign exchange and Treasury markets. Morningstar is one of the largest independent sources of fund, equity, and credit data and research in the world, and our advocacy for investors’ interests is the foundation of our company.

The Role:  Working closely with the Director on the team, the Associate Director is responsible for helping manage the North American Multi-Asset and Alternatives Strategies team, ensuring that it produces high-quality strategy-level analysis and broader asset class research that helps investors make better decisions. This position is based in our Chicago office.

Responsibility:

•    Foster a collaborative team culture that aims for and prizes high-quality research, resulting in analyses that are insightful, ratings that are good calls for investors, and broader research that helps investors understand the multi-asset and alternatives managed products landscape
•    Help the team expand its coverage and research of model portfolios
•    Support the group’s analysis and research in non-fund areas, including 529 plans, Health Savings Accounts, and Mexican Pension strategies
•    Manage a team of analysts, making sure that they have a clear understanding of their coverage, research and other responsibilities, and are able to execute at a high level 
•    Contribute to training and development of new analysts 
•    Ensure that analysts are fully prepared to best represent themselves to institutional clients
•    Coordinate with the Practice Lead and Director to align clear employee KPIs to business goals
•    Together with the Director and the coverage committee, participate in strategy coverage decisions
•    Work alongside the Director and senior members of the team to set the group’s thought leadership agenda
•    Instill an ethos of continuous improvement regarding analysis, research, team organization and collaboration
•    Engage with the external market (media, wealth managers, regulators) to strengthen understanding of Morningstar capabilities

Requirements:

•    Bachelor’s degree; an MBA, CFA, CFP or other advanced degree/accreditation a plus
•    Seven to 10 years experience in manager research or a related role
•    Demonstrated expertise in strategy level analysis
•    Proven effective people management and team building skills
•    Excellent communications skills
•    Strong time management skills
•    Familiarity with programming languages (i.e. Python, R, MATLAB) a plus

Recommended Action:

Please submit a cover letter, resume, and optional thoughts below in order to be considered for this role.

The Manager Research department and Morningstar deeply value diversity and consider having a diverse employee base as core to the intellectual vibrancy of our spaces, the employee experience, and ultimately, business success. Diversity presents itself in many different forms, such as: unique work or life experience, race or ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or place of origin, religion, socioeconomic status, disability, etc. We invite you to submit an additional attachment to tell us how you may contribute to the diversification of the Manager Research department and Morningstar as a whole. The submission of this statement is optional for all applicants. Please limit your response to 600 words or less.